The wheeler-dealer aged 102 takes out a 25-year mortgage

A man of 102 has been given a 25-year mortgage for £200,000. If he survived to pay off the debt at age 127, he would be the oldest person who has ever lived.

The pensioner, from East Sussex, has agreed to make repayments of £958 a month, on an interest-only basis.

He will use rent from the property to pay them and is understood to be hoping to profit from rises in the property's value.

It is thought the pensioner sees the buy-to-let market as a way to easy money, despite growing warnings that high property prices make it difficult to profit from renting out homes.

Most banks and building societies have an age limit of 75. But a number of lenders, including the Mortgage Trust, Bristol and West, Woolwich, and Preferred, impose no age restriction.

He secured his loan through Mortgages for Business, a Kent firm that has helped hundreds of elderly people buy homes.

The firm's spokesman Jonathan Moore said yesterday: "Even five years ago, anybody over 65 would have been hard-pushed to get any kind of mortgage.

"But some lenders have eased their restrictions to keep in step with the market.

"This 102-year-old has taken this interest-only, buy-to-let mortgage out as an investment in partnership with his family and his repayments are being covered by his tenant.

"It's not risk-free if property prices and rental income suddenly fall. But look at the South-East - there's a great property market.

"Rental is absolutely booming because the South-East hasn't got enough houses. Many over-65s take out mortgages to invest invest in buy-to-let because the pensions crisis has left them with insufficient income."

Mortgage lenders have become increasingly willing to extend large loans to anyone willing to sign on the dotted line, whatever their prospect of paying off the loan.

There are said to be thousands of pensioners saddling themselves with large debts that they are unlikely to live to pay off.

The world's oldest person, Jeanne Calment, died in France in 1997 at 122.

As it happens, she pulled off a property coup of her own.

In 1965, when she was 90 years old, she agreed to give her flat to a young solicitor when she died, if he paid her a pension of £330 a month.

He died two years before her - after paying out three times the value of her home.